Barack Obama addresses a meeting on refugees during the UN general assembly.
Photograph: Andrew Gombert/EPA

A coalition of more than 30 countries has unveiled a series of concrete responses to the refugee crisis, giving a glimmer of hope during a week in which world leaders gathered at the UN summit in New York have otherwise failed to offer direct action on refugee issues.

Barack Obama announced that the US-led coalition had collectively agreed to roughly double resettlement places for refugees, increase humanitarian aid for refugees by $4.5bn, provide education to 1 million more refugee children, and potentially improve access to legal work for another million adults.

But the mood changed on Tuesday, with 18 developed countries announcing plans to increase legal access for refugees, 17 developing countries pledging to increase refugees’ access to education, and 15 claiming that they would take various measures that could help to expand refugees’ access to work.

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The western countries included those that are well-known for their generosity to refugees, including Germany and Sweden, as well as those, such as Australia, that are often criticised for their treatment of asylum seekers. Argentina and Portugal were among the countries who pledged to start resettlement programmes for the first time.

Commenting on the relative success of his initiative, Obama said: “We’re going to have to be honest: it’s still not enough – not sufficient for a crisis of this magnitude.”

But he added: “I hope this is a beginning.”

Leaders from the world’s major refugee-hosting nations praised the pledges, but warned that they meant little if they were not carried out. Most pledges made at a similar summit in London in February have not been fulfilled.

“The refugee crisis requires not just [pledged] commitment but follow-through,” said King Abdullah of Jordan, a country that hosts more Syrian refugees than all the countries in the EU, whose population is 50 times bigger.

The US also admitted that the pledges announced on Tuesday include measures announced earlier this year, and said that some of the pledges may not strictly fall within the previously stated goals of the summit.

“We took a very broad interpretation,” Ann Richard, a US assistant secretary of state, said in an interview with the Guardian. “It didn’t have to be a formal UNHCR resettlement programme. It could be other legal pathways for admission – scholarships, work visas or humanitarian visas.”

The pledges also include decisions by Turkey and Jordan in January to nominally open their labour markets to Syrians even though many Syrians in both countries are in reality still excluded from legal work.

According to US officials, other labour-related policies included those that simply allow refugees to live outside camps, or give them access to agricultural land.

Refugee specialists who had criticised the vague UN-led declaration on Monday were cautiously optimistic about Tuesday’s US-led announcements.

David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, a major refugee agency, said: “The political inertia has finally been broken and now it needs to be turned into genuine momentum through effective implementation of each pledge.”

Alexander Betts, head of Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre, said: “For people who are thinking that the achievement of [the UN-led declaration on Monday] was a fairly abstract declaration, [Obama’s summit on Tuesday] is about something more specific. It’s about pledges, it’s about real commitment, it’s about money and resettlement. But the question that remains is about what kinds of pledges will be made and followed through on.”

Implementation is also a concern for the US, Richard admitted. “For me the much harder piece is follow-up,” said Richard. “The countries that make commitments – do they mean it, and will they follow through? Usually an administration would spend the next year making sure these countries follow up – but the Obama administration is going to leave office at the end of January.”

More generally, Betts, the Oxford professor, questioned whether even the US-led initiative had gone far enough.

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At a time of profound need, world leaders had squandered a chance to radically rethink the treaties and organisations that govern the world’s handling of refugees, Betts said, arguing that the refugee system needed to be rethought in the same way that the international monetary system was reworked in the 1970s.

“The refugee regime was created in the 1950s for Europe and the early cold war era,” said Betts. “Yes, it’s been adapted incrementally, but we’ve never had a moment of systematic reflection.”

Betts added: “In other areas, like the international monetary system, when there was a big crisis as we saw in 1971, reform took place. 2016 should be the refugee system’s 1971. It should involve reflection on our legal model, our organisational model, and our operational model – and that’s what the political capital that we’ve invested in these two days should have gone towards. But as it is, I think there are achievements, but I’m not sure these achievements reach the level of ambition that the international community should have had in response to the refugee crisis.”